Obama and Blago

By BEN SMITH

12/09/2008 08:39 PM EST

David Axelrod denied earlier today that Obama had spoken to Blagojevich about the Senate seat, but not that the two men had spoken, and a reader points out that the last time they actually met is obvious -- Obama's visit to the National Governors Association last week.

The reader sends on the picture above from the event.

There's lots of chatter this evening about the relationship between the two men, with Obama's backers portraying it as frosty, his detractors potraying them as brothers in arms.

The reality of Obama's relationship with the Chicago Democratic machine is more nuanced, and has been widely explored. He certainly isn't a creature of the machine, wasn't born into it like Daley or married into it like Blagojevich. He came up in the reformist enclave of Hyde Park, but -- as is often the case with a strong machine and talented outsiders -- after he emerged, the organization's leaders saw his promise, and gave him some leeway, and he didn't mount a crusade against their transactional political system. To have refused, for instance, to support Blagojevich in 2006 would have been a major reformist statement; Obama didn't make it, and instead backed the incumbent governor. Obama's tighest inner circle -- Jarrett, Emanuel, Axelrod, Bill Daley -- is composed of people at least one degree closer in, and who each made millions in part off their various connections.

Perhaps the best way to see him is as a neutral in the (lopsided) battle between machine and reformers in Illinois. That's the stance he took in a defining battle, the 2006 contest for the presidency of the Cook County Board of Commissioners. Reformers fault him for failing to support their champion; but he didn't endorse the machine favorite either. He stayed on the sidelines, and kept his focus on the White House. You can accuse him of cowardice for that, or you can grant him that he had decided to devote himself to larger causes and ambitions than Illinois political reform.

Unlike many others, Obama has not enriched himself off the machine; the closest he came was accepting Tony Rezko's apparent help in buying a house. He backed ethics legislation that made the traditional ways a bit more inconvenient, though the fact that State Senate President Emil Jones, a leading machine soldier, backed it suggests it wasn't exactly revolutionary. And he kept himself apart from many of the transactions -- and other insiders, seeing his promise and not wanting to taint him -- kept him away from any taint.

This isn't really particularly mysterious; it's a fairly common pattern in urban politics, in which smart organization pols let a fair-haired boy (back in the day when they were all Irish) keep his hands clean, and he does keep his hands clean. But as Obama's degree closeness or distance from Blagojevich comes under intense scrutiny, it's worth keeping the broader structure in mind.